Switching Places

“Baby Mama,” “Roman de Gare,” and “88 Minutes.”

With many film stars jumping back into television—and who can blame them, since that is where you find the better scripts these days—it is heartening to see someone make the leap in the other direction. Tina Fey, currently of “30 Rock,” throws herself into “Baby Mama” with a will. She plays Kate Holbrook: thirty-seven years old, vice-president of development at the Round Earth food company, and childless. To fill this gap in her résumé, she pays for a surrogate mother, Angie (Amy Poehler), who not only carries Kate’s fertilized eggs but, in an even more intimate gesture, moves into her apartment, having nowhere else to go. What’s more, each has a man to deal with. Angie has Carl (Dax Shepard), whose infinite love for her is proved by his license plate (“MYGRLROX”), and Kate finds Rob (Greg Kinnear), the funny, sensitive, yet so not gay proprietor of the Super Fruity juice store. But, hey, this is a film about pregnancy. You’ll never guess how it ends.

Not that predictability weighs against a film. What counts is not the well-tried grid of the narrative but the kick of energy that you send through it, and, for a while, “Baby Mama,” written and directed by Michael McCullers, feels low on surge. As Kate lays out her life in voice-over (“Some women got pregnant. I got promotions”), the patness of the lines suggests that we are in for a well-meaning, slightly whiny issue movie; whereupon McCullers changes issues, and saves the day. Forget the title, the target audience, and the taglines: what fuels “Baby Mama” is not the eternal quest for motherhood, or the topical conflict between parenting and careers, but an old-fashioned scuffle over class. Nothing places us on the social scale as accurately as our child-rearing, and one shot of kids being called across a sunlit playground—“Time for your playdate with Wingspan and Banjo!”—summons a world of liberal cuteness. Clean-living and high-earning, Kate markets gloopy green soup and other organic treasures to the discerning. Angie: “That crap is for rich people who hate themselves.” Oof.

Much of the film boils down to Poehler and Fey hanging out and jousting, and connoisseurs of oddness may glimpse the ghosts of Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau looking on with twitches and grouches of approval. Angie is skinny to Kate’s curves, loose-tongued to her zipped-up sense of fun, fertile to her barren jealousy. Angie wears pedal pushers and tank tops, whereas Kate stalks around bare-legged in skirts that lurch to a halt two inches above the knee, which is a length that Christy Turlington would struggle to carry off. It’s possible that Fey, like other television stars, is unused to being framed in full length, and, though in complete command of her delivery—dry, spiky, but unthreatening—she hasn’t yet made up her mind how funny her body is meant to be. She isn’t big enough to make a joke of her ripeness, like Bette Midler, but she’s no Lily Tomlin, either. She could do worse than steal a trick from Lucille Ball—a lovely, elegant figure who taught herself to be graceless.

Mind you, no one could claim that “Baby Mama” is a thing of beauty. It looks cheap, shiny, and bereft of depth, and McCullers hasn’t shaken off the horrible habit, shared by most modern comedy directors, of covering up cracks and doldrums in the story by playing pop, either chirpy or teary, over a montage of uninspiring images. Yet there are gags and scraps of action that give the movie fits of buoyancy, and these tend to come not so much from the younger, eager performers as from the old hands. If you want to see scene-stealing turned into grand larceny, watch Sigourney Weaver, as the owner of the surrogacy service, or, better still, Steve Martin, as the presiding genius of Round Earth. Hand the guy a thick hank of ponytail, relieve him of the burden of a central role, aim him squarely at the bull’s-eye of eco-smugness (“I’ve toasted pine nuts on the edge of an active volcano”), and you find him happier onscreen than I have seen him in years. Who cares whose baby is inside which mother, when the laughs come from the grown man doing business with his inner child?

There was a time when, as a God-fearing member of the community, you could commit a single murder, drop a couple of clues, and wait to be unmasked. Now it’s all serial slayers, stacking up bodies like air miles. Filmgoers are supposed to find this multiplicity enticing, and we are constantly being invited to enter into the “mind” of the serial killer, but in truth there is no drabber place to be, and the idea that there might be an artfulness, even a style, to the act of homicide is one of the more pernicious fantasies that movies like to hawk.

Two new films pursue this folly, one less annoyingly than the other. In “Roman de Gare,” directed by Claude Lelouch, everyone is driven to trade one self for another. The crime writer Judith Ralitzer (Fanny Ardant) is not, we come to realize, responsible for writing her best-selling books. As for the diminutive Pierre (Dominique Pinon), he is either her ghostwriter or her secretary; then again, he could be a serial rapist and killer, whose escape from prison is announced on French radio, or perhaps the errant husband reported missing by Florence (Michèle Bernier). Whatever the case, he is asked by Huguette (Audrey Dana), whom he meets at a gas station, to pose as her fiancé for the sake of a trip to her parents. She is a hairdresser, although she might be a hooker; and so on, until our certainties are frazzled and frayed away.

The air of mystery here is appealing, because the secrets behind it seem to matter both a great deal and not at all—rather like love, which has been Lelouch’s subject ever since he made “A Man and a Woman,” forty-two years ago, and which is of minimal consequence to everyone but the lovers themselves. The problem with “Roman de Gare,” however, is that the tale grabs you more than the telling. Pierre does magic tricks, and Lelouch, following suit, shuffles his plotlines like marked cards, but his blitheness has a habit of turning slack, and too many scenes outstay their welcome, as if he had decided to toy with the rules of crime fiction without deigning to show that he could, if pressed, obey them. By the end—which, true to form, feels cheerful but insubstantial—the film is relying on the charms of its cast. Dana is a real find (you try playing a cigarette-powered harpy while managing to drift, like smoke, into the audience’s affection), and Pinon, best known here for his cultish work in “Delicatessen” (1991) and “Alien: Resurrection” (1997), is a one-man fairy tale—startling proof that you can look like a frog and still wind up as somebody’s chosen prince. The strongest performance comes from a rural pig, which emits a rush of unbearable squeals as it is slaughtered. Thankfully, this occurs off-camera, although whether it means that our friend the serial killer is back in business, or simply that dinner will soon be on the table, I cannot say.

The best thing about “88 Minutes” is the title. Jon Avnet’s movie bumbles along for twenty minutes, at which point Dr. Jack Gramm (Al Pacino) is informed by a gravelly phone call that he has eighty-eight minutes to live. We then switch into real time, and the countdown begins, allowing us to calibrate precisely how much more of the film we have to suffer through. Avnet is setting a noble example here: if all movies were named after their running times, Hollywood would instantly become a brisker place. Would Peter Jackson have dared to put us through a Tolkien trilogy called “Nine and a Quarter Hours of Elves”? I don’t think so.

Gramm is a forensic psychiatrist, who majors in serial killers. A nutcase (Neal McDonough) is in jail, awaiting execution, yet crimes identical to his are being perpetrated on the outside, and Gramm, who testified against him, is being simultaneously framed and hunted down. What follows makes absolutely no sense—a buzzing, fidgety mess of bad cinema, with people barking inquiries over their cell phones instead of enjoying what used to be called conversation. There is no basis for the criminal motives, no excuse for the slavering closeups of sadism wielded against women, and no reason that Pacino should have paused before feeding the script into his shredder. I sense a weariness in his features—an insomnia of the soul, as it were—that has nothing to do with his character and everything, I suspect, to do with his feelings for an industry that can pay him good money to prop up junk. Compare “88 Minutes” with “Sea of Love,” another murder mystery that Pacino made, in 1989, and you find him sporting the same loud ties, but everything else has leached away: suspense, credibility, wit, and the lost art of flirtation. As a result, nothing would give me keener pleasure than to reveal the identity of the killer, but a day after seeing the film I have genuinely forgotten. It was either a man or a woman, but beyond that everything is a blur. “It’s my job to be convincing,” Dr. Gramm explains. Sorry, Doc. You’re fired. ♦

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